Bash Environmental Variable Not Recognized

Question

I use Bash for my terminal on Debian. In my .bashrc, I've defined an environmental variable like so:

SSH_VAULT_VM="ssh-vault"

if [ "$SSH_VAULT_VM" != "" ]; then
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~user/.SSH_AGENT_$SSH_VAULT_VM
fi

This is to facilitate separating my SSH private/public keys on my bare metal host OS (Qubes OS) as described in this repo. The way split SSH works in Qubes OS is by hosting the private key in a VM, and the public key in another VM (from which I'm running Emacs). Whenever I use SSH then, a dialog box pop-up appears to confirm accessing the private key.

When I open Emacs from a Bash terminal, the SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable is properly defined (as observed in the initial-environment variable), and attempts to use the SSH key (e.g., in the magit package) succeed with the pop-up confirmation box. However, when I open the Emacs GUI (using X?), the SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable is incorrect (instead set to something like: /tmp/ssh-[some random name]/agent.[3 digit number]) and attempts to use the SSH key fail.

How can I make Emacs use my .bashrc settings such that this split SSH feature will work? I'd be happy to either correct some config to make Emacs load this variable correctly, or overwrite it with the correct value in my .emacs.d file. I've tried including something like: (setenv "SSH_AUTH_SOCK" "/home/user/.SSH_AGENT_ssh-vault") in my Emacs config, but that doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

I'd say you want it in the .profile instead .bashrc. It works from emacs terminal because it's associated with a terminal, thus reads the file first.

Read Bash startup files.

edit: I was assuming that we were talking about user configuration files, something that later I've realized it wasn't that clear. Also, you can use .xsessionrc to make those variables available on X sessions.